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https://theconversation.com/parliamentary-report-slams-mutual-obligation-calling-for-total-overhaul-of-employment-services-218807>
"A parliamentary inquiry has delivered a scathing indictment of Australia’s
employment services, finding it does not serve the interests of job seekers or
employers and urging the privatised system be partially wound back.
A rigid approach to mutual obligation is killing unemployed people’s
motivation, employers are flooded with inappropriate applications, and people
are not adequately assessed upfront, the inquiry has found.
“We have an inefficient, outsourced, fragmented social security compliance
management system that sometimes gets someone a job against all odds,” the
committee chair, Victorian Labor MP Julian Hill, writes in his foreword to the
report into Workforce Australia Employment Services.
The inquiry, done by a House of Representatives committee, finds the system
can’t be fixed by “tweaks”.
It recommends a comprehensive rebuilding of the system with a much stronger
role for government, including the establishment of a new entity within the
public service to drive the system and be a “hybrid provider”.
Employment services were privatised 25 years ago and form the federal
government’s biggest single procurement outside defence.
The inquiry found jobseekers are subject to “excessive – often very punitive –
compliance and enforcement arrangements, which have little or no positive
impact on their capacity for social and economic participation”.
The present approach “is tying the system up in red-tape and pointlessly
harming productivity in providers, driving large and small businesses away from
the system, and actually making many people less employable.”
The inquiry urges a more tailored approach.
This would include counselling clients several times before moving to
compliance, an adjusted sanctions regime, and having “human decisions-makers”
deal with key compliance functions, removing “Robo-Cancel” automation in
suspending and cancelling payments."
About time. The current system is purely ideological and a waste of taxpayers
money, primarily serving to kick people who are already down. So of course
conservatives, who instigated it, continue to support it.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
